The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (29 page)

The Constitutional Commission completed its work in record time, a mere nine weeks. There was good reason for this speed. During the autumn the international crisis in the Balkans intensified,
with Russia threatening to go to war in order to protect Serbia and Montenegro from Ottoman vengeance and secure reforms in Bulgaria and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Gladstone’s pamphlet on
The
Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East
had gone on sale in London on the day before Abdulhamid was girded with the sword at Eyüp: the pamphlet sold 40,000 copies in a week in
Britain, while a translation printed in Moscow set up a record for Russia of 10,000 copies in a month. The famous appeal for ‘the Turks’ to ‘carry away their abuses in the only
possible manner by carrying off themselves . . . bag and baggage . . . from the province they have desolated and profaned’ made welcome reading in Moscow and St Petersburg, although it was
regarded as inflammatory by statesmen still hoping to limit the crisis to the Balkan peninsula. Yet the pamphlet and the meetings of protest in Britain and in Russia helped shape government
policies. On 4 November the Great Powers accepted a British proposal for an international conference which was to gather
in Constantinople and examine ways of granting
administrative autonomy to Bosnia and Herzegovina. The conference would affirm the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire, while considering administrative reforms suitable to the Bulgarian
provinces.
⁵

Abdulhamid regarded the proposal for such a conference in the imperial capital as outside interference with the peoples whom Allah had so recently called him to protect. Never before had a
Sultan been faced with so humiliating a proposal; and for a fortnight Abdulhamid prevaricated. On 14 November partial Russian mobilization—together with the continued need of the Ottoman
state for financial assistance from abroad—induced him, with extreme reluctance, to accept the idea of the conference. With one exception the delegates comprised the ambassadors to the Porte,
supplemented by professional diplomats whom the foreign ministries in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg regarded as experts in Balkan affairs. The exception was the principal British
delegate, the Marquess of Salisbury, Secretary of State for India in Disraeli’s cabinet. His six-week visit to the Ottoman capital was to have a far more enduring significance than the
conference itself.

Lord and Lady Salisbury, and their eldest son, arrived at Constantinople on 5 December, three months after Abdulhamid’s accession. No British cabinet minister had spent so many hours
studying foreign affairs or written about them so extensively; and it is characteristic of Salisbury that he should have sounded out opinion in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and Rome before completing his
journey to the Golden Horn. While the British prime minister and ambassador were turcophile, Salisbury already privately believed that the Crimean War had been a disastrous error of policy. These
prejudices were confirmed by his hosts in the European capitals, who thought the Ottoman Empire had sunk into irreversible decline.

Nothing Salisbury saw in Constantinople caused him to revise his opinions. Abdulhamid received him in audience, showing those exquisite good manners which Elliot admired. But, to the
ambassador’s dismay, Salisbury remained unresponsive. He mistrusted the Sultan and all his ministers, despite the honours Abdulhamid bestowed on his guests. Not even the Order of Chastity
(Third Class), so courteously
awarded to the Marchioness, mollified her husband, although it amused him. ‘A wretched, feeble creature, who told me he dared not grant
what we demanded because he was in danger of his life,’ Salisbury wrote in a private letter home to his third son that Christmas.
⁶
Such a comment
from a career diplomat accredited to the Porte would be of little interest. But in 1876 Salisbury was the coming man of British imperial politics; as Foreign Secretary or Prime Minister (and
generally as both) he was to shape British policy for almost half of the Sultan’s thirty-two years on the throne. Never did he revise his conviction of Abdulhamid’s worthlessness.

The conference was preceded by nine round-table sessions at the Russian Embassy, under General Ignatiev’s chairmanship, intended to decide exactly how the Sultan should put his house in
order. As if to prove his commitment to reform, on 19 December Abdulhamid appointed Midhat Pasha Grand Vizier. When, four days later, the conference held a first full session in the Ottoman
Admiralty building beside the naval dockyard on the Golden Horn, the opening deliberations were suddenly disturbed by the booming of guns. Blandly the Ottoman Foreign Minister informed the
delegates that the sound they heard was a salute honouring the proclamation of Midhat’s constitution. With reforms promised for the peoples of the empire, the Sultan’s representatives
argued that the conference had become a superfluous irrelevancy. Well-orchestrated patriotic demonstrations by Muslim students denounced Panslavism and called for war against Russia; delegates
noted that Greeks and Armenians were as vociferously anti-Russian as the Young Ottomans. These gestures of popular feeling strengthened the Sultan’s resolve. Every proposal by the foreign
delegates was rejected. On 20 January 1877 they abandoned the task. Their collective departure, planned as a dignified reproof, lost its effectiveness when the waterfront was lashed so severely by
a gale that only an indignant Lord Salisbury braved the appalling weather.
⁷

Abdulhamid was not displeased over the discomfiture of the foreign delegates who had assembled in his capital to dictate reforms. Nevertheless the failure of what the Turks, with a touch of
derision, called the Dockyard Conference (
Tersane Konferansi
) kept Europe’s
money markets closed to the impoverished Ottoman state while bringing closer the
prospect of war with Russia; and the Sultan, who hated Midhat, could therefore blame his Grand Vizier for having humiliated the foreign envoys. He also noted with sympathy the complaints of
military and religious leaders at the Grand Vizier’s attempt to have Christians accepted alongside Muslims as cadets at the War Academy. A fortnight after the conference broke up, Midhat was
summoned to the Dolmabahche; he noticed as he arrived at the palace that the imperial yacht had steam up, though early February seemed an unlikely season for Abdulhamid to put to sea. But the
Sultan was not even present at the Dolmabahche. An officer of the household informed Midhat that, under the emergency clause of the constitution (Article 113), the Sultan was ordering his arrest
and banishment, as a danger to the state. He was put aboard the imperial yacht, which sailed at once for Brindisi. A minor bureaucrat, totally dependent upon his Sultan, replaced him as Grand
Vizier. The diplomatic corps was assured that, although the architect of the 1876 Constitution might be in exile, the Sultan had no intention of abandoning the parliamentary
experiment.
⁸

Elections had already taken place in several provinces and were about to be held in the capital. They caused no excitement: the franchise was restricted, and the indirect voting procedure was
regulated by a complicated pattern of electoral colleges. Among the more distant subjects of the Sultan, the prospect of parliamentary representation aroused little interest, except negatively in
the Lebanon, where the Maronites refused to take part in any elections for fear that an all-Ottoman parliament would threaten the autonomy won fifteen years before. But in the third week of March
1877 the Sultan opened the
Meclis
-
i Mebusan
(Chamber of Deputies) in an elaborate ceremony at the Dolmabahche attended by the diplomatic corps, the religious notables and all the
dignitaries of state.

The Speaker was nominated by Abdulhamid, ignoring agreed procedures for election to the office by the Chamber itself; but the Sultan’s speech was read to deputies by his palace secretary,
Küchük Mehmed Said, who was to serve as Grand Vizier on seven occasions during the reign. The speech held promise of a programme of reforms which would
improve
administration, justice and farming. The deputies—71 Muslims, 44 Christians, 4 Jews—then retired to the chamber set aside for them in Stamboul, a hall in a building near St Sophia,
built in 1840 as a new university but subsequently housing government offices. There, over the following three months, the deputies discussed such topics as the composition of advisory councils in
the provinces, a restrictive Press Law, and the need to cut the salaries of civil servants.
The Times
correspondent, attending one of the early sessions, was impressed by the multinational
character of the
Meclis
-
i Mebusan
: ‘We have counted in the Chamber 10 nationalities speaking 14 different languages,’ he reported.
⁹
During the summer the Sultan appointed 21 Muslims and 5 non-Muslims to constitute a senate, the
Meclis
-
i Ayan
(Chamber of Notables). Abdulhamid allowed the two
chambers no power and little initiative. The parliamentary session coincided with a mounting crisis, more threatening to the Ottoman Empire than any since Sinope; and yet the urgency of affairs
rarely touched the work of the lower chamber. It was assumed, justifiably, that the deputies would approve any stand made by the Sultan and his ministers against external interference.

The failure of the Constantinople Conference was followed by a Russian diplomatic offensive in the European capitals which culminated in the Russian-inspired joint London Protocol of 13 March:
the Sultan, the Tsar and the Balkan rulers would demobilize their armies, pending the introduction of reforms within the Ottoman Empire which would be supervised by the Great Powers. The Sultan
would not accept dictation from Europe, and within ten days the Porte rejected the Protocol. The Russians, who had already made secret agreements with Austria–Hungary over the future of
Bosnia and Herzegovina, concluded two treaties with Roumania allowing the Tsar’s troops free passage to the borders of Bulgaria. Eight days later—on 24 April 1877—Alexander II
proclaimed a state of war with the Ottoman Empire and called on his armies to march ‘for Orthodoxy and Slavdom’.
¹⁰

This fourth Russo-Turkish war of the century lasted for ten and a half months. When the Russians crossed the lower Danube in June it seemed as if they would sweep all before them, for although
the Ottoman soldiery fought bravely and had good artillery, staff-work was almost
nonexistent. On the Caucasus Front the Russians swiftly seized several forts, forcing the
Ottoman commander, Ahmed Muhtar, to concentrate his forces at Kars, the fortress which had been stormed twice by the Russians in the past half-century. Now Kars was again defended ably for five
months. Despite initial Russian victories in the Balkans the former commandant of the War Academy, Husnu Suleyman, showed great enterprise in bringing an army by sea from Albania to Dedeagatch and
launching a surprise counter-offensive which halted the invaders at the Shipka Pass, in the main Balkan chain. But the hero of the campaign was Osman Pasha. On 20 July, and again ten days later,
his courageous generalship resisted wave upon wave of Russian assaults against the small fortified town of Plevna (Pleven), some eighty-five miles north of Sofia. A third attempt to take Plevna in
mid-September cost the Russians even heavier casualties. Thereafter Plevna was meticulously invested by Russia’s great military engineer, General Eduard Totleben. He would not storm the town;
he would starve its defenders into surrender.
¹¹

Briefly, before the coming of winter, a mood of optimism prevailed on the Golden Horn. There was hope that fog, rain and snow would impose a stalemate on the battle fronts, making the Tsar seek
peace: the long Russian supply lines were vulnerable to wintry conditions while Abdulaziz’s expensive toys, the Ottoman ironclads, gave the Sultan naval supremacy in the Black Sea. At the
same time, Abdulhamid raised morale by what, in retrospect, stands out as the earliest appeal to Panislamic sentiment. He countered the Tsar’s invocation of ‘Orthodoxy and
Slavdom’ by placing a new emphasis on his claims as Caliph. The sacred standard of the Prophet was solemnly borne out from the Topkapi Sarayi. With this Islamic oriflamme in his hands and
with the backing of the
ş
eyhülislâm
, the Sultan-Caliph proclaimed a Holy War (jihad) against the infidel armies of the Tsar. As Alexander II had some 10 million Muslim subjects, a
full response to the call of jihad would have provoked a grave rebellion within the Russian Empire. An agent of the Sultan travelled to Kabul to encourage the Afghan Muslims to open a new battle
front in Central Asia. For the moment, however, a mass Islamic uprising remained unlikely. The immediate consequence of the jihad in the Ottoman heartland was an upsurge of patriotism, bringing
recruits to
the army and contributions to a war fund. Significantly, on 21 May the parliamentary deputies paid their sovereign the compliment of proposing that he assume the
honoured title of
Ghazi
(warrior leader against the Infidel).
¹²

During the summer the Sultan became increasingly hopeful of support from London. Four days before the Russian declaration of war, Sir Henry Elliot was succeeded as ambassador by Henry Layard, a
turcophile archaeologist who had excavated Nineveh in the 1840s while serving as an attaché under Stratford de Redcliffe. Layard’s public and private papers show the extent to which he
modelled himself on Stratford, offering Abdulhamid the type of constructive criticism which the Sultan’s father had accepted from the Great Elchi during the Crimean War. ‘A man out of
whom much might be made,’ the ambassador wrote home patronizingly after his first audience with Abdulhamid; and at their second audience he was, he declared, ‘even more favourably
impressed’ by the Sultan’s qualities.
¹³
Prime Minister Disraeli (created Earl of Beaconsfield the previous summer) accepted Layard’s
judgements and warnings at their face value, although his Foreign Secretary (Lord Derby), his Indian Secretary (Lord Salisbury) and other cabinet ministers remained sceptical. In July, when the
Russians seemed likely to break through to Edirne and the Gallipoli peninsula, Disraeli sent friendly assurances to the Sultan, indicating his willingness to order the British fleet through the
Dardanelles to protect Constantinople from Russian occupation. Abdulhamid, however, had no desire to see the ironclads of the Mediterranean Fleet in the Sea of Marmara. The stubborn defence of
Plevna and the failure to push Suleyman Pasha’s troops back to Thrace relieved the threat to his capital, and the warships came no nearer than Smyrna.